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It’s faded, but for a while there it was a fad among the wits and wags in the national press corps to compare the President to Mr Spock. I don’t know who started this. I blame Maureen Dowd but I can’t remember if it was her idea originally, or if she just liked it so much she did with it what she does with all her favorite witticisms and metaphors, beat it to death, or if I just like attributing all the flaws and follies of the press corps to her because she deserves it. Whatever and whoever, what was meant by it was that the President was cold, emotionless, unfeeling, and somehow not quite human, a slander on Spock as well as on Obama. But there is a way in which the President really is like Mr Spock.

He seems to expect logic to carry every argument and he’s baffled and annoyed when it turns out it doesn’t and he’s forced to re-explain things he believes he’s already made perfectly clear in more, well, human terms.

He’ll do it, and when he does, he does it well, but he doesn’t look like he enjoys it and he’s always a step or two behind in getting to the podium or in front of the cameras, so that even his most loyal supporters are often heard wondering afterwards, “Why couldn’t he have said that earlier?”

I think in his mind, he did, we just weren’t following the logic.

So here we are again with the President having to explain and sell the ACA …again.

Just once, I’d like it if the Administration got out in front and made the President’s case before the Republicans made their case and their toadies in the media started echoing it as the conventional wisdom.

Or maybe they could call on Bill Clinton, again. Make him the official Obamsplainer. He loves to explain things. And he’s brilliant at it.

Of course, back in his day, the press corps hated him for that.

Darn know-it-all. Who did he think he was that made him think he was so much smarter than us? The President?

Some of this sounds like the ranting
of an aged widower with a gift for vituperation that he likes to exercise,
drawling dictations for [his secretaries] to admire. [Twain] was too close to
the scene and misled by the clamor in the daily newspapers, although he knew
very well how deceptive the press’s outrages can be: how this week’s uproar…can
have sunk into oblivion two weeks on. ---from Mark Twain and the Colonel: Samuel L. Clemens, Theodore Roosevelt, and the Arrival of a New Century
by
Philip McFarland.

As turmoil swirls, Sebelius takes
hot seat—Edward-Isaac Dovere & Jennifer Haberkorn— Not so long
ago, Sebelius was a popular two-term governor with bipartisan appeal. Now the
HHS secretary is the face of a flop, a “Saturday Night Live” caricature and a
woman for whom doing “well” at Wednesday’s House hearing would be not digging a
deeper hole for herself and the botched Obamacare website launch. http://politi.co/1gZXfKb---from Politico’s
newsletter this morning.

I don’t want to hear it, any of it, from any libertarian, unless you are living in a house you built yourself out of material you paid cash out of pocket for, no credit cards from a federally insured bank, on land you bought outright, no mortgage from a federally insured bank, that’s powered, heated, and cooled by solar, wind, or geothermal technology you installed yourself, no hiring contractors benefiting from government subsidies and tax breaks and specially written rules and regulations, with a septic system and a well you dug yourself, no connections to the town sewer and water lines.

You’re going to be paying some taxes, federal, state, and local, no getting around that, so you’re entitled to a few public and publically supported services. You can have internet access and a phone line and expect the police and the fire department to show up when you need them. You even get to complain on winter mornings when the town is late plowing the road up to your driveway. And you don’t have to homeschool your kids.

But you should have kids. Children are the test. Raising a family is expensive and time consuming and it’s what draws most people into some dependence on government, starting with schooling. And then there are those doctor and dentist bills. I assume you’re carrying good health insurance and won’t be buying a better policy through the exchanges (even though you could), but even so, the government’s still involved, regulating the insurance companies so they don’t gouge you or con you or drop you whenever they decide you’re costing them more than you’re making them, making sure your medicine is safe, effective, and affordable, subsidizing hospitals either directly or through grants and tax breaks, and taking care of some of your doctor’s poorer and less healthy (that is, elderly) patients by paying some of their bills through Medicaid and Medicare so that she doesn’t have to treat them free and try to make up for it by passing the costs on to you.

Don’t get me started on what happens if you’re sending them off to college.

I don’t expect you to live like a mountain man in a cabin in the north woods, hunting and trapping and growing your own food and trading for what you can’t supply yourself, although many of you talk as if you’d like to or think you and everybody else should and some of you talk as if you are in fact living like that and the suburban McMansion you call home sweet home is Fort Apache and your sales job at the IT firm involves wrestling with bears.

But, ideally, you should be a farmer and grow as much of your own food as possible. That cuts down on your reliance on the FDA, federally subsidized agribusiness, and government built and maintained highways and rail lines and ports to put the food on your table and see to it it's edible. If you don't farm, then you should own and run your own business. I'll give you a pass on having to depend on government built and maintained infrastructure to keep the lights on and the doors open. Like I said, you pay taxes, and it's not your fault the great majority of your fellow citizens don't want to live in a Libertarian Utopia just yet and spend their weekends paving roads and laying sewer pipe.

But your business better be locally based, no franchises, and serving a local need and customer base, relying on local suppliers to as great a degree as possible and on government, at every level, to as little degree as possible.

You don’t have to believe in no government, but if you aren’t at least trying to take yourself off the grid and off the dole, then I’ve got to conclude that your professed libertarianism is just a high-fallutin’, long-winded, and, usually, very boring way to complain about your taxes. “That government is best which governs least” should not mean “That government is best that does whatever I want and need it to do without making me pay to help it do whatever others want and need it to do.”

That’s Republican thinking.

But then I’m prejudiced. I believe most of you are Republicans, just for one reason or another you’re afraid to admit it. My best guess is it’s vanity. You don’t want to identify with the insurance salesman-church deacon-sadistic gym coach-corporate yes man-country club-obviously self-loathing closet case-Rotarians looking for a hooker at a convention types who make up the media face of the Republican Party. I can’t blame you for that.

I’m sorry. I’ve been taking you at your word. I thought you meant all that idealistic talk about how limiting, even eliminating government involvement in our lives will naturally lead to a return to first principles, that there will be a revival of a true communitarian spirit and society will reorganize itself so that all the things we’re dependent on government for (and so morally weakened and corrupted by government in the process) will by provided by a spontaneous pitching in and our renewed and revitalized democracy will thrive thanks to a mixture of self-help and mutual aid. So it seems to me that self-help---self-reliance---is the key component of libertarianism. If it’s not, what is?

Liberty?

What does that mean? How does it apply?

The liberty to live our lives as we see fit, to be who we are, to put our talents and skills to work as best we can for our own best benefit? The liberty to be left alone to think and act for ourselves?

I’m for that. I thought the Bill of Rights and subsequent amendments and acts of Congress already guaranteed all that. In fact, as a liberal I believe that’s what government is for, to protect such liberty and see that is enjoyed by all Americans.

But maybe it’s proven it can’t be trusted to do that. It’s certainly fallen down on the job from time to time. And there are more than a few states these days where the governors and the legislatures are determined to deny liberty to a great many citizens and limit its enjoyment and privileges to straight white men. Of course, again, as a liberal, I believe that the answer to that is a strong and active federal government. But for the sake of argument, I’ll take your point for the moment, that liberty is best guaranteed by the government that governs least. as long as if by that you intend as a given that you get to enjoy such liberty as long as you don’t hurt anyone else or trample on their rights as you assert your own.

But you don’t intend that. You intend that you get to do whatever you want to make your money without anyone telling you how to go about it. There’s no government telling you have to hire union workers or pay the workers you do hire a decent wage or give them benefits. No government telling you can’t pick and choose your customers based on any criteria other than their ability to pay. No government telling you you can’t run your business for whatever customers you choose without having to make the place accessible to people in wheelchairs or who rely on service dogs, without having to serve any of those people because, you know, once you let them in the store…

You intend that you get to burn as much gas and electricity as you decide is necessary without having to worry about your carbon footprint. You intend that you get to use whatever materials and chemicals you decide are most cost efficient and dispose of the leftovers and the waste as easily and cost-efficiently as you wish. You intend that the goods and services you sell meet only standards you set yourself based solely on what you think you can get the suckers to buy without it losing you money and by “losing” money you mean not making every single dime you assume is yours to make.

You mean you shouldn’t have to pay taxes because you are a maker not a taker and don’t get anything out of government you couldn’t get more cheaply and more efficiently from private contractors and that includes good schools, decent health care, a secure and comfortable and healthy retirement, and even reliable police and fire protection.

And you mean that anybody who gets hurt by your taking and enjoying your liberties and anybody who can’t afford to buy whatever services you would force them to buy by eliminating the government programs and regulations and laws that help them acquire those services, and that includes the Americans With Disabilities Act, the Voting and Civil Rights Acts, and any right to collective bargaining, have only themselves to blame and if they can't get it together to take care of it themselves they can just go suff.

See, I know you. I’ve been listening to you rant about “liberty” for decades. And it’s all about taxes and about being able to make as much money as you can without having to worry about anybody else or feeling obligated to contribute to the public welfare except in the magic way of letting the Invisible Hand of the Marketplace take care of it for you while you go about your business of putting it away by the sackful.

That’s why your intellectual heroes include Hayek and Rand and Milton Friedman and not Jesus and the Buddha and Thoreau.

That’s why so many of your organizations are bank-rolled by the Koch Brothers.

You are essentially Right Wing corporatists, when you are not out and out Tea Party-ists, you’re just glib enough to talk your way around your selfishness, self-centeredness, and greed.

As far as I can see, what you want is no different from what Ted Cruz and Mike Lee and Rand Paul want except for the availability of legal reefer, and by liberty you mean the liberty to deny to other the liberties and rights I count on the government you want to do away with to protect.

You can call yourself a Libertarian, but you are illiberal, and that’s really why this liberal doesn’t want to hear it.

Any of it.

___________________________

Our old blogging buddy and leader in spirit, Tom Watson, has been hearing it, and then some. Tom wrote a column for Salon about today’s anti-surveillance state rally in Washington, branded Stop Watching Us, in which he makes the case that the coalition of liberals and Libertarians sponsoring the rally is bad business for liberals.

Tom’s point is that whatever degree of superficial agreement there is between liberals and Libertarians on reining in the NSA, the two sides are sides and so fundamentally opposed on a great many issues important to liberals that making common cause with Libertarians is in a very real way making common cause against ourselves.

As I added in a comment there, Libertarians have far more to gain from this alliance than we do:

Libertarian self-romanticism aside, politically in the United States right now, libertarianism is basically an apology for letting the corporate rich do whatever they please and very little of what they please to do is in any way *liberal*. And, whatever future utopias libertarianism might someday wish into being, politically, right now, it is tied to the Pauls, Ron and Rand, both of whom are so tightly allied with the Right Wing of the Republican Party they might as well identify with the Tea Party. Rand Paul pretty much does. They aren't working to bring about a libertarian utopia; they are working for exactly the same things Ted Cruz and Paul Ryan are working for, except everybody gets to get high while they end Social Security, Medicare, and Obamacare, and defy the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, deny women the right to control their own bodies, chase Spanish speaking immigrants out of the country, force gay people back into the closet, and leave the disabled to fend for themselves. It doesn't matter that liberals and libertarians share a couple of political beliefs, their overall goals are opposed. Liberals get nothing out of the association, while libertarians get social acceptance and cover for their fellow traveling with Right Wing Republicans.

It’s ironic. Chris Evans and Marvel Studios or, I should say, the directors doing the honors for Marvel (Joe Johnston, Josh Whedon, and, this time out, Anthony Russo and Joe Russo), seem to have learned the lesson of Christopher Reeve much better than their counterparts over at DC, which is the answer to the question how do you sell a character as square and corny as Superman/Captain America? By playing him absolutely straight and taking him at his word.

The National political press corps just spent an entire month reporting on lots of bad news for Republicans. You
know how that worries them. So it’s not surprising they seem about to spend the
next month reporting on bad news for the President vis-a-vis Obamacare as a disaster in progress. Because, you know,
balance!

Glitches in a less than brilliantly
designed website equals shutting down the government and setting out to cause
default on the national debt in the hopes that bringing the economy to the
brink of collapse will show them.

Ok. The website is a disaster. Heads
should roll. But on Monday Facebook got "glitchy" and my students couldn’t post the
links to their blog posts on our Digital Commoners page before their deadline. Meanwhile, I spent the
morning visiting three commercial websites looking for information it took me
three minutes to actually read but an hour and a half to find following links
that were less than helpful (when they existed. There’s almost nothing less
useful than the FAQ page at any website.) I needed to visit a fourth website but I
forgot my password and when I requested a new one I got a message promising an
email was on the way to help me through the process. The email arrived twelve hours later. Just for a laugh, I checked our new insurance company's website to see if it had been updated to show they've expanded their coverage area to our neck of the woods and our family doctor is now in their network. It hadn't. And
this was a relatively good and carefree day on the internet.

Again. The website’s a disaster and
there’s no excuse for it. But every day even some of the best designed websites get overwhelmed. Downloads don’t download or open after they do. Orders get lost.
Payments double post or don't post at all. Identities get stolen. Viruses get spread. Maintenance is being done
when you need to get in there right now! No one seems to have anticipated your
particular question or problem. There’s no easy way to contact a live human
being. The site is just plain ugly. The layout’s confusing. Links are broken.
Information's out of date. Instructions are unclear. Instructions are wrong. Instructions are gibberish! Servers crash. Pages hang. Browsers freeze. This stuff happens all the
time and we live with it because we know through experience whatever the
problem we encounter it will get fixed or we’ll figure out how to work
around it.

Whatever the situation or issue, the
bobbleheads think all Americans are as soft and spoiled as they are.

Ok, once more with feeling. The
website’s a disaster that shouldn’t have happened. But it did and now it’s
getting fixed. And that’s pretty much that. Although it calls into question the
competency of the people supervising the rollout, it doesn’t predict the future
of Obamacare.

We’re not looking at a “train wreck.”

We’re looking at a skyscraper under
construction.

Calling Obamacare a disaster or a
failure already is like rubbernecking at a major construction site during the first
week of construction, noticing that the rubble from what was demolished to make
way for the new building is still being cleared away, looking down into the
hole where the pilings have just been set, watching the delivery trucks backing
up at the gates, listening to the architects and the contractors arguing over
what needs to be done first today, hearing horns honking as the traffic backs
up in the one lane that hasn’t been closed to make way for the cement mixers,
bulldozers, dump trucks, and cranes, eavesdropping on angry neighbors
complaining about the noise and dust and confusion and workers on a break
grousing that somebody ordered the wrong gauge of wire or not enough pipes or
didn’t hire enough guys from their local and a foreman coming over to holler
about falling behind schedule, taking in all this mess and din and declaring
that this skyscraper will never get built.

Or…if it does, it will surely collapse in short order.

If it doesn’t collapse, no one will
want to rent any of the apartments or lease any of the office space.

Even if every office and apartment gets occupied, people won’t like the décor and there’ll always be lines at the elevators.

If they do like it and don’t mind the
lines, it won’t matter, because in fifty or so years the building will have
outlived its usefulness and be torn down and replaced by something else, so
there’s no point in finishing it. Might as well stop construction and let the
site sit empty for the next half a century and anybody who needed the place to
live or the office space or anything the shops down at street level would have
offered can just go find what they need somewhere else, don’t ask us where or
how, or…

Uncle Merlin called in from the Cape this morning to report he’s having woodpecker trouble. Judging by his description, a female downy has punched a hole in the eave of his house. He wanted to know how to drive her away.

“I can’t have her building a nest in there and having babies.”

I assured him that’s not what was happening. Downies don’t nest until the spring. What she’s doing is building a little apartment for herself for the winter.

Uncle Merlin was not mollified. “Well, I don’t want her banging away up there all winter either.”

She won’t be doing any banging.

“I heard her!”

When?

“I don’t know. Last time I was down here. Two weeks ago?”

That might not have been her.

“Of course it was her. It’s her hole!”

It didn’t take her two weeks to make that hole. A day, tops, and she did it quietly. Lots of poking and pecking with her beak. But no banging. That’s not how they work. The banging you heard was probably a male woodpecker showing off. Might not have been a downy either. You have flickers in your neighborhood too. But don’t worry. Whatever it was, the banging’s all done for a while. Woodpeckers only bang during courtship. And it’s not banging, it’s drumming. It’s what they do instead of sing. They’re percussionists, not song stylists. They drum to establish territory and attract mates. The rest of the time they peck. That’s why they’re called woodpeckers, not woodjackhammerers. They use their beaks to peck and poke and dig for bugs and to drill nest holes.

“Ah ha! So she is building a nest!”

Downies pair up in the fall but they wait till spring to nest and lay eggs, I repeated.

“That means I’m going to have two of them up there banging away?”

No. Likely just the one. They mate but they don’t move in together right away. They stay close by each other but keep separate apartments. And, once again, one, it’s not banging, it’s drumming, and, two, the drumming’s over for now because there’s no more reason to drum. The courtship’s over. Now they’re going to wait out the winter, she in her place, he in his, both quietly pecking when it’s time to eat. Come spring they'll go house hunting together.

Actually, male and female downies do go searching for suitable nest sites together. And they argue about it as they flit from spot to spot. The way one of my guide books describes it, they sound like city-dwelling human couples who’ve reluctantly decided to take the next step but are each keeping their own apartments for now, you know, just in case? The dominant member of the pair makes the final choice, and also as with many human couples, gender does not decide dominance. They work it out between them.

So, I told Uncle Merlin, she’ll be gone in the spring.

“I still don’t want a hole in my house all winter. How do I get rid of her?

She still out there, I asked.

“No, she flew off when I went out there and yelled at her. I haven’t seen her since. That was two hours ago. Do you think I scared her off?”

I don’t think she’d be that scared of you if you’re just standing there on the ground yelling up at her. Downies are used to people. In fact, they’re fairly comfortable around us. She probably flew off because she had something she felt she had to do.

“Then she'll be back! How do I get rid of her for good? Come on, bird boy. You’re supposed to know all this ornithological stuff.”

Odds are she got rid of herself. Once she opened up the hole and found it was hollow inside, she probably decided to go looking for a nice solid tree. Too much space. She wants something snug and safe. She’s looking for a studio. That’s a loft in back of there.

The Mannion boys didn’t know anything about Murrow’s Boys when they requested Good Night, and Good Luck for family movie night last week. They’re both fascinated by history and they knew about Joe McCarthy and liked the idea he was finally brought down by a team of courageous journalists. But they’d never heard of those journalists. They didn’t know about Ed Murrow. They didn’t know about Murrow’s Boys. They didn’t know about CBS News, for that matter, at least not about the glory that once was CBS News.

Among us old folks, Murrow is a legendary figure, of course. But what informs his legend isn’t so much his actual accomplishments but what he strove to accomplish.

There’s a hint in the movie that TV journalism---all journalism---was what it is today, superficial, process and narrative obsessed, prone to the worship of power and success and the celebrification of the rich and powerful, including and especially Washington politicians, fetishizing “balance” and “objectivity”. Chuck Todd would have been as at home then as he is now, although he might have thought twice before blithely announcing it’s not his job to sort out fact from fiction or determine who’s lying and who’s telling the truth out of fear of what Ed Murrow would think of him. But part of why McCarthy was able to get away with things he did---“I hold in my hand a list…” was that the national press corps practiced the same He Said-She Said journalism that lets Republicans today claim climate change is a hoax, tax cuts pay for themselves, government spending doesn’t create jobs, Obamacare will establish death panels, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera... I learned in a history of journalism course back in college that after the Senate finally censured McCarthy and he crawled all the way into the bottle---one thing is clear in the clips interspersed throughout Good Night, and Good Luck: McCarthy was almost continually drunk---there was some collective soul-searching among journalists and editors that concluded with the self-indictment that “balance” was another name for institutional timidity and for some time after, up to and through the Vietnam War and Watergate, news organizations practiced a more aggressive and investigative brand of reporting. That ended with the election of Ronald Reagan and the realization that there was a large conservative audience waiting to be exploited as a market for advertising. Probably a lot more to it than that, but the point is that Murrow (David Strathairn earning his Oscar nomination in the same year when, too bad for him, Philip Seymour Hoffman did Capote.) has a speech in which he more than implies that See It Now, Murrow’s signature news program, was as…Guilty? Complicit? Hamstrung? Cowardly? All of the above? as any other news outlet, broadcast or print.

But Murrow wanted to do more and do better and he tried to deliver, and Good Night, and Good Luck tells the story of one of the times when he and his Boys succeeded.

But if he couldn’t always or consistently deliver, Murrow set standards for other journalists to try to live up to, established ideals to try to realize, and defined goals that could be achieved despite the limits of the medium and the foibles and follies endemic in the profession. And his Boys took those goals and ideals and standards to heart and did their best to make CBS News Murrow’s spirit in action.

Murrow would have been proud that it was a CBS News anchor who showed up Sarah Palin as the dangerously vapid and ignorant narcissist she is. I suspect, though, he wouldn’t have been surprised, just disgusted, that Katie Couric’s example was never followed up by the rest of the national press corps and that, in fact, most insider journalists and pundits continued to prop Palin up as a potential world leader for years after most Americans had pegged her for a clown. Palin will never be President but she still wows the yokels and is good for eyeballs and clicks and that makes her “news”.

The most famous of Murrow’s Boys, the one who came to embody Murrow’s legacy and who made CBS News what it was, isn’t a character in the movie, Walter Cronkite. But Don Hewitt is and it can be argued that Hewitt was almost equally responsible for CBS News’ sterling reputation throughout the 60s, 70’s, and even deep into the 80s, thanks to his work on 60 Minutes, which he created and then produced for over thirty years.

But all things end. Most of Murrow’s Boys are long gone, even the generation of newsmen and women they trained has left the studios, and it’s been a long time since CBS News and even 60 Minutes delivered in the way Murrow strove to and taught his Boys to. Two weeks ago Steve Kroft delivered a report that would have appalled Murrow, whose last great contribution to CBS News was Harvest of Shame, an expose of the exploitation of migrant workers. Kroft “exposed” people collecting disability insurance.

Once upon a time 60 Minutes took on the Tobacco Companies. Now it takes on the “poor” and the “sick” and the “broken” and the “disabled.” The tenor of Kroft’s report put quotation marks around all of those words, italicizing and underlining disabled.

If you went by the report, you could easily get the impression that no one who’s collecting disability deserves it, that the whole Social Security system is being bankrupted by frauds, con artists, and loafers who refuse to get jobs.

And the whole thing is just a rehash of the thoroughly discredited NPR/Planet Money story making the same case last spring. What I wrote about that applies to the 60 Minutes piece:

…for all the attention and emphasis [the Planet Money reporter] gives it, you might not know from her story that there a people on disability who can’t walk, can’t get around without a wheelchair, can’t breathe without oxygen, can’t see, can’t hear, can’t roam far from a dialysis machine, can’t regulate their bodily functions, can’t plan their week beyond their next round of chemo or radiation, can’t hold themselves together emotionally without medication, can’t stand for more than a moment or make a move without pain, can’t lift, can’t bend, can’t work.

You might not get the sense that she has any sense that many of these people could work, would like to work, but can’t work because they need accommodations and training stingy employers refuse to provide and because they face hiring prejudices based on outdated assumptions and attitudes about the capabilities of the disabled.

Actually, the only difference that makes the 60 Minutes just a rehash and not an act of out and out plagiarism is the inclusion of Senator Tom Coburn as a main source.

That would be Republican Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, who is only not the most Right Wing Senator from Oklahoma and therefore arguably the most Right Wing Senator in Congress because he serves with Jim Inhofe. Both Coburn and Inhofe have been standing up to the Tea Party lately over the shutdown and the debt ceiling, but whatever schisms there are between the Tea Party Types and the supposed sane and sensible Republicans like Coburn and Inhofe, the two factions are united in their belief that all government spending on the poor and the sick and the otherwise down on their luck is a form of theft and needs to be shut off at the source.

The preferred Republican method for eliminating waste and fraud in government programs is to eliminate those programs.

I suppose this isn’t quite as appalling as if Murrow had made Roy Cohn his main source for his story on McCarthy, but it has to make you wonder if Kroft and 60 Minutes were doing their version of Harvest of Shame now if their main source would be someone like Iowa Congressman and rabble-rousing know-nothing Steve “Calves the Size of Cantaloupes” King or, worse, Ted Cruz, or worse and worse, Mitt Romney and the take would be how all those greedy and ungrateful immigrant workers were just coming here for the free housing and to drop their anchor babies.

The 60 Minutes piece and the Planet Money one might be evidence of the corporate and conservative co-option of the once upon a time actually somewhat liberal “liberal” media. But I think they’re more examples of a general thirty year drift away from Murrow’s ideal that television news should do more than “entertain, amuse and insulate”, it should “teach…illuminate [and] even inspire” towards a more advertising friendly desire to incite, inflame, frighten, and enrage with the targets of our wrath not being the politicians and business leaders who are screwing up our lives but…each other.

If the spirit of Ed Murrow and his Boys and his Boys’ boys and girls still thrived, the villains of the news would be demogogues like Ted Cruz, Sarah Palin, and Steve King and flim-flam artists like Paul Ryan.

The villains of the news these days seem to be our fellow Americans who are cheating and robbing us all blind.

Iron Man beside himself: Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark feeling less than invincible as he contemplates what else he is without his suit of armor besides a genius, billionaire, playboy, and philanthropist, and wonders if he’s up to that job in Iron Man 3.

Maybe it’s the painkillers talking, but I’m about to write a review of Iron Man 3 arguing it’s a two hour commentary on Pixar’s The Incredibles.

This isn’t a joke. After all, The Incredibles is one of the best superhero movies ever made, right up there with Spider-Man 2, Batman Begins, and the original Iron Man. Every superhero movie ought to be able to stand up to comparisons of one type or another with it.

No matter where I go with this, I will not be arguing that Pepper Potts is sexier than Mrs Incredible.

But think about it. Syndrome is a version of Iron Man. Both owe their powers to available technology which means both are walking, flying, fighting advertisements for the notion that anybody can be a superhero. Syndrome not only embraces the idea, he intends to peddle it. Tony Stark rejects it, but what is it Cap says to him in The Avengers?

“Big man in a suit of armor. Take that off, what are you?”

And that’s the big question. What makes Iron Man a “super” and not merely a spoiled man-child playing with a lot of cool toys he’s invented?

What makes a “super” a superhero is one of the themes of The Incredibles. It’s the theme of the Tony Stark/Iron Man arc in the Avengers series.

Iron Man 3 is the story of Tony Stark trying to answer for himself the challenge Captain America put to him in The Avengers:

Stark tries to get back at Cap by calling him a lab rat and belittling his powers. “Everything special about you came out of a bottle.” Which shows that he must never have read his father’s notes on the Super-Soldier project.

We know, from Captain America: The First Avenger, that everything special about Steve Rogers was already in him. That’s why Dr Erskine picked him. The serum just brought it to the surface. At heart and in his soul and to the physical degree he was capable of, Steve Rogers was already Captain America.

Iron Man 3 is one of the better-made of all the movies in the Avengers series. But I left the theater feeling strangely let down and anxious and…lonely.

Alienated might be the better word.

This ennui surprised me because I thought I had been enjoying the movie while I was watching it. Mulling it over afterwards, I got half way to concluding I’d just been put off by the obligatory ad for the video game that’s become the standard climactic battle of every Marvel superhero movie. At least this one varies from the endings of Spider-Man 3, both Fantastic Four movies, Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man 2, Thor, and The Avengers. It doesn’t take place in the city streets full of crowds of screaming civilians running pointlessly to and fro while cars and trucks blow up around them and pieces of buildings rain down on their heads. But it’s confused, directionless, repetitive, purposeless in that it doesn’t build toward a satisfying confrontation between our hero and the villain, it just keeps throwing up more obstacles between them until the director and his stunt coordinator run out of gags and the whole thing just sort of times out, nihilistic, perfunctorily violent for violence’s sake, visually ugly, boring, and ultimately just another big noisy mess, and it’d have been no wonder if it was what had soured me on the film.

But then I realized that all the battle had done was dampen the sense of fun to the point that I was left feeling more strongly something I’d been feeling all along.

Sad.

And it dawned on me that Iron Man 3 is in fact a sad story about the losses that come when you reach a certain age and you turn around and realize you are now the grown-up in the room and everybody around you is relying on you and you have no one to rely on yourself in the same way, because all the grown-ups you used to count on are gone from your life.

In Iron Man and Iron Man 2, Tony Stark behaved as if he didn’t need anybody and nobody really needed him. Being a superhero was just something he did to amuse himself. In The Avengers he got a lesson in teamwork. He found out he couldn’t go it alone. The question was going to be whether the lesson would take.

Maybe we’ll get the answer to that in The Avengers 2. In Iron Man 3, Tony learns something else, that he was never as alone as he’d always thought and prided himself on being. But he learns it by finding himself suddenly very much alone. And he learns it while also learning that being a superhero isn’t something he can do for kicks. It’s something he’s obligated to do because other people need him to be one. And he learns that when as it happens he doesn’t have his superpowers.

Big man in a suit of armor. Take that away and what is he?

Jeez. No wonder Tony’s so sad. And since he’s still played by Robert Downey, his sadness is profound and convincing and, at least for me, infectious.

This is the first Iron Man---the first Avengers---movie without a certifiable grown-up, good or evil, to guide, advise, support, or challenge the hero, or, as Stark has always taken advantage of, mother, father, big brother or sister him. Agent Coulson is dead. Nick Fury is off doing whatever it is he’s doing with Cap in The Winter Soldier, along with Black Widow. Jim Rhodes is busy trying to chase down the super-terrorist known as the Mandarin. Happy Hogan’s in the hospital. Jarvis, Stark’s cyber-assistant and alter-ego, has been knocked out of commission. And, while Pepper Potts lives to take care of Tony, the trouble coming his way is way beyond her skill set and it isn’t long before she’s in no position to take care of him in any way.

Even Iron Man is out of the picture for much of the picture.

That is, if you accept that it’s the armor that makes Tony Stark Iron Man and not Stark who makes the armor something more than a machine.

Stark’s tried and true suits of armor have disappeared in the rubble of his house after the Mandarin’s minions leveled it in a helicopter attack and the one suit he has left is a prototype designed to assemble itself telekinetically but it has a few bugs in its program so that at the moment it’s much better at disassembling itself. It has a habit of short-circuiting and falling apart on him and eventually, instead of carrying Tony through the air, Stark is hauling it through the snow on a makeshift litter.

Tony is left to save himself, save his friends, save the President, save the country, and save the day all on his own, and it’s not a job he feels at all up to.

Iron Man 3 isn’t about learning that with great power comes responsibility. It’s about learning that with responsibility you don’t have enough power to take care of everybody you’re responsible for and yet you still have to try to take care of them.

In Iron Man 3, we get to see Tony doing things he hasn’t had to do before---think seriously about what he’s up to, doubt himself, ask for help---and not doing things and being things he’s used to doing and being. He has to not be so full of himself, not deflect criticisms, not shrug off or joke away feelings. In short, he has to act like an adult. Since he regards all this adult behavior as a drag (and an assault on who he thinks he is), he is add odds with himself in a way he hasn’t been before, consciously.

And he’s not sure whose side he’s on.

He jumps back and forth, but either way he jumps he treats himself as he’s been in the habit of treating everybody, dismissively, with impatience, with a general lack of sympathy, with offhand contempt, and as the deserving object of his meanest jokes.

And this means we get to see Robert Downey doing something he hasn’t had do to often in the series, play it straight. He gives us a Tony Stark who’s sober, somber, sorrowful, afraid, and…lonely.

It’s disconcerting. And of course Downey does it all very well. Maybe too well. Which it’s why it’s like I said earlier. Infectious.

Nothing that happens in Iron Man 3 undid that for me.

Since Tony is on his own throughout much of the movie, Downey is on his own too. He has some fun moments in the early going with Jon Favreau as an unhappy Happy Hogan and a funny scene with a couple of the villains’ henchmen who let themselves get a little cocky after making the mistake of thinking that Tony Stark without his armor is just a billionaire, playboy, and philanthropist. But his scenes with Gwyneth Paltrow as Pepper Potts and Don Cheadle as Jim Rhodes are mostly a matter of their focusing together on the same spots on the green screens. All his best work with the Rebecca Hall as a sexy scientist with a secret and Guy Pearce as an unsexy scientist with a bigger secret is over and done with in the first fifteen minutes of the film.

And when Stark at last confronts the Mandarin, Downey’s main job is to hang back and feed Ben Kingsley pieces of scenery to devour.

The closest then Downey has to a co-star to really share a scene with is eleven year old Ty Simpkins, who plays Harley Keener, a fatherless middle-schooler with access to a workshop Tony commandeers to try to repair his recalcitrant suit of armor after it crashlands in the woods outside Harley’s small town in Tennessee.

Harley is a budding engineering genius in his own right and desperately in need of a father-figure, so naturally he takes to hero-worshipping Tony right away, something the old Tony would have enjoyed as his due but at the moment, beaten up from within by self-doubt and self-recrimination and not in the mood to hear what a swell guy he is, something he doesn’t feel he deserves. This has Tony brushing off Harley’s attempts at friendship which allows Downey to deliver some of the most acerbic anti-child acting since W.C. Fields last said, “Go away, son, you bother me.”

If you’re thinking that Tony and Harley sound a little like they're paralleling Mr Incredible and Buddy Pine at the beginning of The Incredibles, then you’re thinking along the same lines I’m thinking, but you’re ahead of me. I’ll catch up.

Downey and Keener make a good team, but given that Tony is divided against himself, Downey is really his own main co-star and mostly left alone to play against himself. Which means we finally get to see Tony Stark/Iron Man in the full Hamlet mode that’s the signature emotional state of Marvel’s superheroes.

This doesn’t mean he’s all gloom and doom. Like Hamlet, Downey’s Stark is still quick with a joke and, since the suit of armor’s been taken away, we get to see him (Downey and Stark) do something else we haven’t really seen him do yet, play the action hero. And Downey has a ball with it. As is the case with any great movie star, the man can move.

Stark is in good shape and he’s had training that’s made him a martial arts expert, but he’s no Captain America without his armor. What he is, though, is a genius. That’s his superpower: his ability to think and invent and build on the fly or, since the suit’s out of commission and he’s grounded, on the run.

He has to MacGyver his way through various challenges and around obstacles and past dangers and out of all kinds of trouble, and, as he showed in his last three outings as Tony, Downey is a genius at playing a genius. He doesn’t just look and sound smart, he moves smart. As a scientist, he’s poetry in motion. As an engineer, he’s a dancer and a painter, a musician and a performance artist. He makes the act of creating look creative.

Of course, what we’re really seeing is if without the suit of armor, Tony Stark is still Iron Man.

There’s always been a distant allusion to the Tin Man of Oz in the Iron Man myth, the working and survival and metaphorical existence of Tony’s heart being always and often literally an open question. Tony’s brain is what powers and empowers the armor, but what the suit needs is a heart. The Stark chapters of the Avengers series have been about the search for Iron Man’s heart.

But in Iron Man 3, there’s one more missing element Tony has to find.

Courage.

Tony has never been a fraidy cat. But that’s not the same as saying he’s been courageous. What’s to be afraid of when you’re the Invincible Iron Man?

But it’s not physical courage he needs. He has plenty of that, although with him it’s a fine line between bravery and a recklessness born of pure vanity. Tony needs to find the moral courage to accept grown-up responsibility for other people even though he doubts he has the strength or the wisdom necessary for the job.

Ok. This has gone too far down the Yellow Brick Road. Let’s back up so I can get back to The Incredibles.

In most superhero movies and most action-adventure movies in which the supposedly normal hero is in effect a superhero, the villain drives the plot in one of two ways.

Either he’s just going about his business as a supervillain and his scheme to control or destroy whatever he feels he needs to control or destroy is really just an excuse to show our hero acting heroically.

Or it’s personal. For one reason or another he has it in for our hero. His schemes to control or destroy are just ruses to draw our hero into a trap and, of course, force him to act heroically.

Sometimes the two get combined. Things get personal because our hero gets in the villain’s way and the villain’s feelings are hurt by that.

In The Incredibles it’s the second situation. It’s very personal for Syndrome. But with this variation. It’s the hero’s fault.

This is where things can start to border on the tragic or, at least, on the grown-up. Sometimes it’s personal because the hero has, to one degree or another, helped bring about the evil he has to confront and defeat.

And in effect, this puts our hero in conflict with himself.

Kind of goes without saying that The Incredibles isn’t a tragedy. Neither is Iron Man 3. And neither one is really intended for grown-ups. But it’s definitely an important theme of both movies. And The Incredibles does a better job of developing it and resolving it.

Both movies begin with our heroes making the same potentially tragic mistake. They reject offers of help from characters they make clear they regard as not worth their time or attention.

Stark does it with less reason and more cruelty and with a gratuitous demonstration of open contempt. But the effect is the same. The characters whose help they reject return to threaten everyone they love and they return having reinvented themselves as evil shadows of our heroes.

They’re also in it for the money, of course. But that’s gravy. Mainly what they’re after is the sense of self-aggrandizement and self-satisfaction Mr Incredible expressed in rejecting Buddy’s application to be his sidekick. “I work alone” means I don’t need anybody else. But it also means “I get to take all the credit and reap all the rewards.”

Mr Incredible can only triumph by recognizing the mistake he made that brought Syndrome into existence and rectifying it. He has to face up to the fact that he can’t work alone and, not only is this well played-out in the dialog, it’s resolved in the climactic battle.

That’s what makes The Incredibles far more satisfying in the end.

That and that Syndrome is just a much better written villain with a far more interesting and sexy sexy henchwoman.

But it’s getting to where asking which movie you think is best is like asking which chapter of a novel you liked best. All the chapters share in a fan’s affection for being part of the same book, and that’s the point. Iron Man is now thoroughly part of the Avengers series and I missed the other Avengers, Cap most of all. Not just because I’ve always liked him the best, but because his story is still ongoing.

Tony’s almost certainly going to be back for The Avengers 2 and probably for an Iron Man 4, and there’s already talk of recasting when Robert Downey decides to take off the armor for good. But really Stark’s and Iron Man’s story was completed in The Avengers and in a very real way Iron Man 3 is about driving that home---the story is done and it’s time to say farewell.

So maybe that’s what I was feeling at the end. A sense of loss.

It’s over and I’m going to miss this Iron Man.

_____________________

Yes, Stan Lee’s back for another cameo, and, yes, you should sit all the way through the end credits.

Like I said up top, as much as I like Gwyneth, Mrs Incredible is far sexier than Pepper Potts. But know what else? Much as I like Don Cheadle? No way the Iron Patriot is as cool as Frozone.

_______________________________

Saturday Matinee update: I'm not the only one who saw references to The Incredibles. Via Oliver Mannion: How Iron Man 3 Should Have Ended. Probably you shouldn't watch if you haven't seen the movie. Spoilers, of course, but also the jokes won't work if you don't know the film.

I didn’t write the post below to show how smart I am about Ted Cruz. Ok. Not just to show how smart I am about Ted Cruz. I meant it as a set up for this post.

So…

Ted Cruz risked wrecking the economy to make himself a hero to the Right Wing yahoos who will play a big role in deciding who gets the Republican Presidential nomination in 2016. He’s in Iowa almost as much as he’s back home in Texas. He’s building a tremendous email list, lining up donors, and piling up the cash. He’s got Sarah Palin stumping for him, which we’d like to think is the kiss of death from a lipsticked pig, but the Right Wing yahoos still love her and fork over their dough at her slightest wink. In short, he’s running for President and his plan is to manipulate the rubes and demogogue his way to the nomination.

In the innermost sanctum of Clintonland, it is difficult to imagine that Hillary and Bill, two of the savviest politicians in the country, are not pinching themselves to make sure that it's all real. Perhaps they're dancing a jig together, or knocking back shots and howling at the moon out of sheer, giddy joy at their good luck. (OK, Hillary's not howling, but Bill might be.) Or maybe they are just quietly kvelling over the latest turn of events.

That little puppet show being passed off as analysis is by the National Journal’s Michael Hirsh, but it could be by any one of dozens of journalists and pundits who’ve had a grand time over the last twenty years writing about the Clintons as if they are the Sopranos, the Walter Whites, or the Drapers, characters in a soap opera produced specifically for the amusement of the savvy and sophisticated and over-educated for whom half the pleasure of following a TV show is listening to themselves talk about it.

Joe Klein started it with Primary Colors, his cleverly signing himself as Anonymous suggesting that his cartoon of a novel was really a work of inside journalism. Maureen Dowd has made it the centerpole of her career, setting the rules and the establishing the tropes that all the Clinton caricature artists have assiduously followed. These journalists and pundits have given themselves permission to present their fantasies as facts with the result that just about any piece of “reporting” about the Clinton is essentially a work of fiction.

And since the Clintons aren’t isolates and naturally appear in the news with other politicians and public figures the stories about those other politicians and public figures get turned into subplots in the ongoing, collectively written fiction about the Clintons.

I don’t know why this is. I don’t know how supposed newsmen and women justify to themselves treating their intellectual gamesplaying not only as if it’s news but as if it is the news. I have theories, I have stories I tell myself, but I don’t know because I don’t know any of them and when I want fiction I read novels and watch television. (Not the news or the Sunday bobblehead shows though.)

What I do know is that if Hillary Clinton becomes the next President of the United States it will be because she worked her way to the White House and if Ted Cruz becomes the next President of the United States it will be because he schemed and lied and recklessly demogogued his way there.

And if it’s the former the “news” will be that her vaulting ambition has finally been rewarded and if it’s the latter it will be that her ambition will finally have been thwarted.

Philip Bump at the Atlantic Wire thinks the whole shutdown and debt ceiling debacle that has sent the GOP reeling has been good for at least one Republican.

Ted Cruz.

That’s the guy all the other Republicans in Congress supposedly hate now. But they don’t matter, because as Bump reports, four out of ten Republican voters still support the Tea Party and Tea Party Republicans Love Love Love Ted Cruz.

As we've noted, Cruz's anti-Obamacare crusade was a spectacular failure in the realm of national politics, but it has been a big success for Cruz among the heavily conservative Tea Partiers. He won the straw poll at the Value Voters Summit, and raised over $1 million in the third quarter. But the news gets better with this Pew poll…

…Among non-Tea Party Republicans, Cruz's net approval became negative. Among Tea Partiers it skyrocketed. And Tea Partiers are much more likely to be familiar with Cruz — meaning that a large percentage of the Republican base is aware of who he is and gained a more favorable view of him after the filibuster, etc. People likely to gain a negative view of him are less likely to know who he is. Win, win…

…Not only was Cruz the only Republican leader to see a gain among Tea Party Republicans, but both Boehner and McConnell saw declines that were much more drastic than Cruz's among non-Tea Party Republicans. In other words: The Republican leaders of each chamber's caucus took much more of a hit among members of the party than did Cruz.

The polling was conducted before the shutdown was resolved, of course. (As of writing, it still isn't resolved.) But anyone who thinks that Cruz will be chastened by his defeat is probably very much mistaken. On every metric that matters to a possible contender for the party's presidential nomination in 2016, Cruz is excelling.

All this adds up to is that Cruz is running for President and if you’re not taking that into account when judging what he’s been up to over the last few weeks you’re missing the big picture. Everything he’s done that has made him look like a fool to liberals and a selfish crazy man to establishment Republicans---Rep. Peter King of New York really hates the guy---has made him look like their kind of President to the Tea Party types who will have a big say in who gets the Republican nomination in 2016.

And the logical thing to conclude from this is that Cruz knows what’s he’s doing.

This is so obvious that you’d think someone would have noticed it weeks ago if not sooner.

Wait. Someone did.

Come 2016, everybody will have forgotten.

Almost everybody.

Everybody but the Right Wing zealots who make up the Republican base and control the party.

They’ll remember that Ted Cruz was their hero of the moment.

This is what I think is going on with Ted Cruz.

Ted Cruz is ambitious and cynical as well as smart.

He was smart enough to see before other Republicans and the geniuses in the political press corps that the odds were against our having a Republican President come 2013 and are still against it for 2017…

But he was smart enough to see something else.

He looked over the Republican bench, the people the media and the Party establishment have marked as potential nominees, the Jindals, the Rubios, the Ryans, Santorums, Walkers, Christies, and Rand Pauls and he saw that none of them are smart enough, reactionary enough, mean enough, angry enough, and hateful enough to rally the Right Wing faithful who will decide the early primaries and caucuses and so the nomination.

None of them are all that, but Ted Cruz could be…

It’s looking to me there’s a consensus growing among the punditry, left and right, that Ted Cruz made a fool of himself in one way or another this week, that he did himself harm by making the Party leadership mad at him, that he accidentally helped the President and the Democrats by admitting the Tea Party’s dearest cause, the repeal of Obamacare (which, by the way, is just another way of saying the humiliation of the President. One and the same to them) is a legislative impossibility as long as the Democrats control the Senate and a Democrat lives in the White House.

But the people who think Cruz is a fool aren’t voting in the Iowa Republican Caucuses. The Republican Party leadership is a gang of weaklings, quislings, bunglers, and clowns. And even if Cruz has somehow helped the Democrats and the President now, he has driven home the point to the faithful who will be voting in the Iowa Caucuses that what they’re voting to do is put a Republican in the White House who is one of them, a Republican who is as angry and mean and willfully destructive as they are but who is also as smart as a Democrat.

And that Republican would be…?

That’s from a post called Cruz Control, which was published on September 27, by…Lance Mannion.

This can’t be emphasized enough. A lot of Tea Party types in Congress are driven by hatred, anger, prejudice, and fear, but on top of that a great many of them are also really, really, really dumb.

They don’t know how the government works. They don’t know how money works. They don’t know how history works. They don’t know how a society puts and holds itself together. It’s a good bet they don’t know how their cars and cell phones work.

These are the ones who truly believe that failing to raise the debt limit and letting the nation default on all its financial obligations will make the economy stronger and life in the United States generally better.

Basically, they are people who if they’d been members of the crew would have dealt with the water gushing in through the hole the irceberg ripped in hull of the Titanic by opening a hole on the other side of the ship to let the water out.

There is no understanding the Radical Right—-the tea party types—-without understanding how driven they are by hatred of those others.

There’s no understanding them without understanding how afraid they are that those others will take over and do to them what they desperately want to do those others, which is make them disappear.

There’s no understanding what they’re doing without understanding that it’s being done to punish those others.

There’s no understanding them without understanding that they regard most of their fellow Americans as those others.

There’s no understanding what they’re doing without understanding that on top of all that a great many of them are just plain stupid about how the government works, how money works, and how the world works.

And there’s no understanding what’s happened to the Republican Party without understanding that party leaders and most Republicans in Congress do understand all this and yet are still surrendering to the Right Wingers.

So there’s no understanding what’s going on not just in Washington but in state capitals across the south and up and down the Midwest, with the not as strange as it may seem addition of Pennsylvania, without understanding that for all it matters there is no more Republican Party. There is only the Radical Tea Party-Fundamentalist Christian Right and it is out to destroy everything the rest of us, we others, hold dear about the United States.

John Boehner holds the nation hostage because the Tea Party holds him
hostage. The problem with modern Republicans is not fanaticism in the
few but cowardice in the many, who let their fellows live in virtual
secession from laws they disagree with. ---from Back Door Secession at the New York Review of Books blog.

As digby notes, lamestream media types are beginning to wake up to the fact that the Republican Party has become the party of hateful and destructive and not particularly bright yahoos. Finally the Villagers are listening to us, right? I doubt it. I’m pretty sure that what’s opened their eyes is that the shutdown and the promised fight over raising the debt ceiling are threatening their stock portfolios. Back when the yahoos were only hating on African Americans, women, gays, immigrants, Muslims, the poor, and the sick, the Tea Party was “jess folks” and the yahoos reg’lar Merkins.

The New York Times’ Bill Keller thinks what’s happening in Congress is that the Republicans are “finally having their [19]60s” and he compares Ted Cruz’s fake filibuster to Abby Hoffman trying to levitate the Pentagon. To which driftglass points out:

For the historically and analogically-impaired, let me risk stating the blindingly obvious by reminding everyone that nobody ever handed the SDS a global economy to use as their personal pinata.

Nobody ever came within a skajillion miles of electing Abby Hoffman to anything, much less a position of real power within the Worlds Greatest Deliberative Body.

James Woods and Robert Downey Jr, both playing against type and personal politics as a pair of liberal lawyers, in the 1989 drama True Believer.

Very important update: James Woods has responded to this post on Twitter, graciously, considering he feels I've insulted him and gotten important facts wrong. For one thing, he is not a Republican. He's a registered Independent. You should read my twitter feed to read his responses. I've made a few revisions below, accordingly.

James Woods---great actor, Right Wing kook---spent a good deal of time on Twitter this past week railing against Obamacare. It was a pathetic display of arrogance, ignorance, and spite. Woods seems to think people are being mandated to buy an actual product called Obamacare from a federal store, as opposed to health insurance policies from private companies. But, you know, he’s an actor. The Mark Ruffalos of the movie industry, people who take the time and trouble to understand the issues and causes they’ve adopted are rare on the left as well as the right. And, for the most part, who cares? Politics isn’t their job.

But with Woods and Obamacare it’s a case of a probable multi-millionaire (Woods has never been big box office, but he’s worked steadily on high quality projects and I’m guessing he’s made good money and had sound financial advice) who can afford gold-plated insurance and who, anyway, is old enough for Medicare, desperately trying to convince people with little money and crappy insurance or no insurance not to take advantage of the exchanges.

But then, he is a Right Winger, and it’s a staple of Right Wing rhetoric to tell people they’re better off not taking advantage of any government program. Of course this is at the bidding of the owner class who wants to make sure their employees have nothing to depend on to keep body and soul together but the sufferance of their bosses. The idea is to make workers abjectly grateful for whatever the owners choose to pay and offer in the way of benefits.

Already stories are beginning to bubble up of people quitting jobs they took just for the crumby health insurance.

Although Woods likes to think of himself as a tough-minded, independent, contrarian sort, he’s just another corporate shill, although I'm guessing he doesn't realize he’s working for the likes of the Koch Brothers for free.

But in his own mind, Woods is a hero and a potential martyr. He says---and he’s boasting when he says it---that he expects that his stream of 140 word anti-Obamacare diatribes, which are not incidentally hateful and spiteful anti-President Obama rants as well, are going to cost him acting jobs. The liberal powers that be won’t let this bold and brave conservative unpunished.

I’m sure he’s right, considering how hard it is for Kelsey Grammer and Jon Voight to find work.

Grammer’s another martyr in his own mind for the cause. It’s a very different Republican Party from the days when Charlton Heston marched with Martin Luther King and Grammer may not realize how times have changed and how his mouthing off in support of the party of the Tea Party, heirs of the Dixiecrats, and the Religious Right is offensive to the many women and gays and people of color and the straight white men who love them he not only has to work with but work for. But you’d think he’d notice that all these people he thinks are out to get him are still happy and proud to work with him and add him to their casts.

But to hear Grammer, you’d think his career hangs in the balance and any day the word will come down, the black list will include a new name, and the vindictive liberals who run the industry will have seen to it that Grammer will be lucky to be doing infomercials.

Woods seems to be thinking along the same lines, cheerfully, as if he’s looking forward to his martyrdom and the subsequent satisfaction of being able to say Told you so.

I understand why Woods and Grammer and other conservatives in Hollywood might feel like odd men and women out and how it might make them grumpy. If Hollywood liberals are anything like many liberals I’ve met in academia, there’s probably a lot of parading of politics as virtue, as if how you vote is always result of a conscious and reasoned moral choice and not, as it mostly truly is, a mix of self-interest and accidents of birth, experience, and education. Liberals annoy me sometimes. I annoy me sometimes. I’m sure it’s not easy to listen quietly to people spouting liberal pieties who you know are underpaying their nannies and gardeners, refusing to promote women to positions of influence and authority, and constantly finding excuses to keep the casts of their oh so hip TV shows lily white.

Doesn’t seem to be liberal hypocrisy that upsets them, though, at least not as much as their own potential victimization. And that I don’t get, how these successful, celebrated, and (in Grammer’s case, at any rate) beloved stars manage to indulge an image of themselves as put-upon and oppressed, victims of prejudice and discrimination. The self-pity behind this is bemusing. The self-infatuation is amusing and expected. They’re actors, after all. But the self-delusion is just depressing.

But then they are Right Wingers and it’s a salient trait of the Right these days to wallow in their shared sense of victimhood. To hear them tell it, the most persecuted minority in America is middle-class white people, with rich white people coming in a close second.

I’d like to think this is defensive, a sign of a bad conscience, that deep down they know it’s wrong to side with the strong over the weak, the rich over the poor, the healthy over the sick, as if that last one should even be a competition. Most Right Wingers are avowed Christians and Every man for himself and I got mine, you get yours aren’t exactly themes of the Sermon on the Mount.

What it really is, though, is paranoia.

Paranoia is the well spring of Right Wing reactionaryism.

Not paranoia of the tin-foil hat variety. They aren’t afraid of being kidnapped by aliens or that operatives from secret government agencies are watching them or that strangers are out to get them. They’re afraid a set of known others are out to take something from them. It’s the paranoia of a dog with a bone. What’s theirs is theirs and there’s not enough of it to share. Whenever they see one of them, those others, get something they think belongs to them or ought to belong to them, they’re infuriated. They feel robbed, even if they still have that something themselves, even if they don’t need whatever it is.

Woods will never have to worry about his health insurance. But it’s driving him crazy that millions of people who did have to worry don’t have to worry (at least not as much) anymore. He can’t stand it that they’re enjoying things that by right ought to be only his, peace of mind among them.

This would be merely pathetic, easily dismissed crankiness on their part, except for the extent these cranks are willing to go to get their own back.

Sign over the entrance to a karate studio next door to the IHOP in Boonton, New Jersey.

Over the entrance of a karate studio that’s gone out of business.

This one’s bugged me for years. Every time we’ve stopped for breakfast at the IHOP on our way to visit Old Mother and Old Father Blonde and I’ve read it, I’ve pictured some Bluto-esque former Marine drill instructor type bending down to push his face into the face of a weeping eight year old who just couldn’t keep up to yell, “What are you, a quitter?” If there’d been a sign like that over the doors of young Ken’s dojo when we took him to sign up, I’d have turned right around and gone looking for another sensei, one less full of his own bluster and taken with his own tough-mindedness I hate inspirational sayings generally and bullying ones like this especially, so when I saw the place had closed since our last trip this way my first mean-spirited thought was “But I guess it’s ok to quit when you’re an adult.”

But in all likelihood the owners didn’t quit, didn’t want to quit, would have loved to have stayed in business, did everything they could to keep the place open, and despite their efforts, despite their determination, despite their never having quit, in the end the money just wasn’t there.

Or maybe it wasn’t the money. Maybe it was their health. Maybe in spirit they didn’t quit, but their bodies quit on them.

No matter how hard we try, no matter our best intentions, no matter how determined we are not to quit, life just refuses to play fair.